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Date: March 27th, 2020.

Time of Writing: 8:01 PM.

Weather: Pretty warm out. Clear skies.

Mental and Physical Health State: My head hurts and my throat hurts, and my cough hasn't gone away. Mentally, I feel a little rejuvenated from my walk today, but also drained from school work.

Day Overview: I stayed up until like four thirty in the morning last night, caught in a trance of browsing YouTube content, only slinking away to my bed in a brief moment of lucidity that let me break free of my stupor and close the laptop lid. When I woke up, finally, around eleven in the morning, I spent a couple of hours in my bed resuming my YouTube addiction. Then, my Dad asked me to go on a walk with him, so I did, because getting out of the house would be a nice change considering the last time I was outside at all was last Friday to sit on the porch for a little while. We walked on the bike path that loops around the neighboring city's high school football stadium, and then all the way south west towards the train station, currently closed, and then came back. It was a nice, three mile walk. During the walk I remembered I had film studies homework to do, and then thumbed it out on my phone while I walked. I hope it was alright. The rest of my day has been, you guessed it, spent on YouTube and homework. Life is currently more than somewhat boring.

On My Mind: Today marks the first time that I've spent any real time browsing the world of academic journals and publications. Good Lord, do they suck! They're incredibly self-referential and the writing is as dry as a desert. They're also stupidly difficult to find anything in. The search engines on these databases are terrible. A lot of the articles are also just incredibly long and I don't really want to browse through them at all. This is all for an annotated bibliography section that I really would rather not be writing. For a presentation, too. I hope I don't have to do too much of this in the future. The requirement for scholarly peer-reviewed journals is entirely arbitrary, and entirely designed to desensitize us to how awful academic institutions can be. Well, not me. I'm not going to shut up whinging about how terrible this shit is. It's bad!

• Windows Open by Dirty Projectors: An incredibly short EP project from this band, which doesn't feature Dave Longstreth on vocals at all. It's incredibly surreal. The instrumentals sound very classic Bitte Orca era Dirty Projectors, but the voice that was so characteristic of those recordings is completely absent. I wish these songs had more time to unfurl and sprawl out in classic Dirty Projector fashion. As they are now, these are some nice, though incredibly brief, snapshots of ideas that I wish could get further development. Pleasant, and nice. Better than a lot of things, I guess. 7/10.
• Cenizas by Nicolas Jaar: It's like someone took the Oneohtrix Point Never song Chrome Country and expanded it to roughly a whole album. Pianos flutter in and out, vocal samples bob up above the surface before being submerged by the tide, and all of this whirrs and twirls around a center of disorienting, skittery electronic production, culminating in an absolutely enlightening track Faith Made of Silk which, in stark contrast to the rest of the album, has something of a danceable pulse. I enjoyed this album a lot. Some of the more ambient pieces felt rather indistinct and generic at times, but the highlights are very much worth looking at. 8/10.
• 3.15.20 by Childish Gambino: This was surprise dropped on the date referenced in the album title, playing on a mysterious website on a loop. There was no real way to tell when the album started and when it ended, so I decided to wait and see if it was going to get a more full release. Just my luck, it did, and I got to listen to it in a more finite form later. It's hard to take this as a cohesive album. It works a lot better if you think of it in the same vein as Untitled Unmastered by Kendrick Lamar, a collection of more or less complete musical ideas in a sort of compilation of sorts. Gambino experiments with many different sounds and styles on this record, and while at times they can be sort of hit or miss, the hits really hit. The whole album is produced incredibly well, too. It's ear candy, through and through, just like Awaken, My Love! before it. I wish the tracks had actual titles, though. And some of the sample choices just fall flat, especially on 47.48 specifically. Pretty good overall, though. This will either grow on me, or I'll enjoy it less as time goes on. 7/10 right now.

• Finished everything I started today.

Works Produced: A few hundred words of creative writing, and upwards of thousand words of writing for several homework assignments. Ideally, the latter category shouldn't outweigh the former, when it comes to whether or not I want to enjoy my physical existence, but there's nothing I can really do about that at a certain point.

Other Thoughts: Thank you for reading my blog. Test results should come next Monday or Tuesday, I don't think they send them over the weekend. I'm anxious just thinking about them.